Ubuntu Grading today

Well, today was the day. It was time to start grading my students on Ubuntu today. Today I focused on two categories: Ubuntu Installation and LAMP.

Luckily for me, about 90 percent of my 11th and 12th Graders had Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10 installed on their netbooks or laptops with two running Ubuntu on the Macbooks. Several other students were waiting for their laptops to be repaired. A couple had older laptops which were not responding very well to the Ubuntu LiveCDs for various reasons. By the end of next week, all my 11th and 12 graders will earn full points for installing Ubuntu on their laptops/netbooks. It was a major feat for some of them since they had to learn how to find the correct drivers for their wifi. Thank God for the Ubuntu forums.

Grading them on LAMP was quite easy. I just checked their localhost and localhost/test.php to see if they installed it. For some, they could not open test.php. I then asked if they installed PHP5 as per my tutorial. Usually, the answer was no. about 10 minutes later they had PHP working. Two students needed to re-install libapache2-mod-php5 to get php to work but they did it. About 50 percent of my students had LAMP running and I expect most will have it working properly by the end of this week.

I did not check to see if MySQL was running yet. I want them to install phpmyadmin first.

Tomorrow many of my students will have to demonstrate their knowledge of the command line. It should be easy for most now 🙂 Some have been Linux users at school for over a year now.

Yeah, there were some problems with installing Ubuntu the last month but we were able to resolve most of them. By third quarter, I hope to start some web development projects with my students. They are a very bright bunch. I may even introduce Linux to my 8th Graders during the 4th quarter 🙂